Now that we have released ASP.NET AJAX V1, I'm thrilled to report that Steve Marx has now updated PHP support for Microsoft AJAX Library. It works with the RTM bits, and fixes several of the issues reported in my earlier samples.

Even better, he's released it as a CodePlex project, so that you can join in and contribute to the project.

Check it out!

If you work in VB.NET instead of C#, you can now get the VB.NET version of the Preview release of the Blog Starter Kit here.

Updated June 22 - Added VB.NET version

In the better late than never category, I finally have a preview of the Blog Starter Kit to share with you. The current preview is not yet ready to deploy, but the core feature set is nearly complete, so it should give you a preview of what the starter kit looks like, and let you start playing with it.

To install the kit, just download and install the zip file into a directory, and open it in Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express. You'll also need SQL Server 2005 Express for the blog database.

It's still far from done, however - in the next preview release, I'm planning on adding the following features:

At MIX '06, and at the Real World AJAX Seminar, I demoed a mashup application that uses ASP.NET and Atlas to provide a richer experience. The application, called MySearch, lets the user enter a search query, and simultaneously searches several services - books from Amazon, web pages and news from MSN, blogs from Technorati, and images from Flickr. The app shows how easily Atlas and ASP.NET can deliver a mashup with a rich user experience.

Here is a ZIP file containing the source code for that demo.

Installation

Using this application requires a few setup steps, because you need to register with the different service providers, and enter the registration information in the <appSettings> section of web.config.

It's been a month since I last posted. I just returned from a much-needed vacation in Mexico, and have been busy with catching up on literally hundreds of emails and other tasks.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a talk on Atlas at the Real-World AJAX seminar in San Jose. It was a small conference compared to some of the larger ones, but consisted of a great audience who were very curious and enthusiastic about AJAX. There were a number of great speakers there - including Jesse James Garrett - and several top AJAX technologies on display. Here's a link to an interview I did with Dion Hinchcliffe about Atlas while at the show.

Since I put the Atlas PHP sample out a week ago, I've been receiving some great feedback about it.

In particular, Christian Wenz, who literally wrote the book on Atlas, has been invaluable in helping me clean up the sample and make it conform to good PHP practices. He has actually been editing my files and sending them back to me with his recommended changes. Many, many thanks to Christian for his help. Christian was here in Redmond this week for a Technology Summit, and it was great to meet up with him in person and discuss Atlas and PHP. I also want to use this opportunity to plug his Atlas book, currently available in online form - it's absolutely awesome!

I've posted a package containing my MIX 06 deck and associated samples. Just unzip the package into a directory and copy the files from the Examples directory into an Atlas project.

One of the demo examples in my talk is missing. It shows the Hover Menu control extender that isn't in Atlas itself, but is included in a separate Atlas Control Pack that we're going to be releasing very soon.

The other thing missing in this package is the search mashup application I built with Atlas. I'll be posting that shortly. It also uses the Control Pack.

Download the MIX talk/demos package here.

We just released the Atlas April CTP this evening. Following up on our big March Go Live CTP, this release fixes many of the key bugs you reported in that release.

One behavior change we made, which will be of interest if you're using Atlas to write gadgets: for security reasons, we've disabled cross-domain access to DataService services by default. Instead, you'll have to manually add the WebOperation attribute to the Select, Insert, Update, or Delete methods on a data service to access them via HTTP GET requests. Since all network access in gadgets happens cross-domain (via an iframe), any gadgets that use the DataService will be affected.

The cat is out of the bag - I am indeed working on a Blog Starter Kit, and this site is running an early prototype of it.

The goal of this Starter Kit is to provide a basic, easy-to-use blog that anyone can pick up and use for their individual site, or customize using Visual Web Developer and ASP.NET. The kit will include the following built-in functionality:

Peter Kellner has built a fantastic app for managing users and roles for ASP.NET sites. In the latest version, he now makes extensive use of Atlas to deliver a rich user experience. Peter has an awesome blog post about what he did to enrich the app.

The Atlas framework has two distinct elements - a client script framework, and a set of server extensions that integrate Atlas with ASP.NET. The client script framework is 100% Javascript, and works with any modern browser. But it is also completely server-agnostic, and works with any web server.

Of course, Atlas and ASP.NET together provide the best, most seamless end-to-end programming model that integrates the client and server. But if you're trying to use Atlas with a different server platform, you can go and write the server components that integrate in similar functionality.

Well, it's three months overdue, but I finally have a new location for my blog. I've been meaning to start blogging more frequently, but was waiting to get this site up and running - now I guess I have no excuse! I also have a new blogging engine to work with - more on that in a later post.

For those who don't know me, I work on the UI Framework and Services team at Microsoft, which is responsible for ASP.NET, Atlas, and Windows Forms. You can find a short bio here.